In between correcting examination scripts and preparing for another examination I’ve been putting the finishing touches to the allocation of teaching to Semester 2 which starts a fortnight today, on Monday 31st January. You might think this is a bit late to be assigning lecturers to modules and it is, but we’ve had lots of staffing difficulties this year and there’s been a lot to manage.
We haven’t yet had any official information from on high about how precisely we will proceed next Semester, but I’m assuming that it will be roughly like last Semester, i.e. with most classes in person and only the very big ones online. The one headache is our Computational Physics class which is quite large this year so we will have to take care about physical distancing requirements for the laboratory sessions. I’m actually teaching that module.
As Maynooth colleague Professor Paul Moynagh has explained, it does look like the omicron wave has peaked in Ireland though I am very confused about how much of this is down to changes in testing strategy. The figures plotted above (7-day rolling averages) only show PCR tests; there are many thousands of positive antigen tests that would previously have been referred for PCR confirmation but which are now just being reported separately outside the official figures.
Anyway, the least we can say is that things do not seem to be getting dramatically worse so there’s no real motivation for imposing fresh restrictions. All the talk is now about relaxing things, actually. The existing rules haven’t been very effective at halting the propagation of the omicron variant so there’s no very good reason for keeping them as they are. I think we just need to ensure that unlocking is not done in such a way that another surge ensues.
We first went into lockdown about halfway through Semester 2 two years ago, which led to our first set of online assessments. Two years later on we look like we might actually have a return to on-campus examinations. Perhaps the set of online exams we’re marking now will be the last? Let’s see.
The main purpose of this post is to encourage you to read a piece written by a second-year student at the blog run by Phil Moriarty of Nottingham University entitled Death of the Lecture: Musings of a second year studentas it provides at least some first-hand reflections from a current student about the difficulties being faced by a student. So, go on, or as they say round here, gwan. Read it.
I couldn’t resist making a few tangential comments of my own.
First, on my philosophy of teaching (such as it is) which is largely formed by my own experiences both as a student many years ago and as a lecturer for many years since then. When I was an undergraduate I didn’t get much out of the lectures I attended at Cambridge and my attendance dropped off a bit as my course went on (though I still attended most). This was because the majority of lectures just involved transparency after transparency being put on and taken off the overhead projector, with students frantically writing down as much as they could but with little time to think. I think that’s what people nowadays call a “traditional” lecture. I agree with Phil Moriarty that these are pedagogically useless. If there ever is a return to normality, the New Normal – to use a very hackneyed phrase – should not be based on this as the primary mode of teaching.
I think this form of non-teaching evolved because it is cost-effective, but academics have gone along with it largely because lots of them actually enjoy standing up and talking about their subject; sometimes it’s difficult to get them to stop. As a matter of fact, that applies to me too. I enjoy talking about physics and astrophysics. I like to think that I can at least communicate some enthusiasm for the subjects through lectures, but I do realize that this does not necessarily make me a very effective teacher.
But in many ways I think the “traditional lecture” described above is a straw man. Many lecturers actually use the traditional format (50 minutes with a class in a large room) to do much more than I’ve just described. When we had to switch teaching online I bought a blackboard and did my lectures from home using it. I know a lot of people found it quaint that I adopted this “traditional” approach but I think explaining mathematical concepts through examples works well via a chalkboard and by standing up I could put more energy into the session than I could if sitting at a screen.
The point is that nowadays we provide students with many more resources to back up this kind of activity – besides my sessions the students get tutorials, and besides the live sessions they get printed notes, problem sets to do on their own, various online resources and of course video recordings. Having all that allows the lecturer to free themselves from the task of delivering material and instead try to cultivate understanding. I never lecture verbatim from notes; I prefer to cover the material in a complementary fashion, expanding on the bits I think need most explanation and/or are most important.
When I was a student I found I learned best not by attending lectures but by reading textbooks and doing problems. That’s just me though. Over the years I realized that different students learn in very different ways. The most important thing for teachers to do is to provide as many ways as possible for the students to learn so they can use what works best for them. In some respects I think of higher education as being more like a smorgasbord than a set menu.
But there lies the difficulty. There is now so much extra material available that many students find it hard to know where to start, just as when you arrive at a buffet table: it might look appetizing but you might not even know what’s in many of the dishes. There needs to be some structure, especially in the early years of a degree to help students find their own way to navigate the more independent methods of study required in an undergraduate degree.
The question for me is not whether lectures have a role to play in the New Normal – I think they do – but what is the best way to incorporate them in a blend. More importantly we need to do a lot more to help students develop their study skills and structure their time so they can learn most effectively. There was no time to do this when the pandemic forced us to change and we were given few resources to assist in the task, but it’s going to be necessary in future as we move inevitably to a more flexible future. Timetabled lectures do of course provide a structure, but there’s almost certainly a better way. As one concrete proposal, I’d call for a vastly expanded induction programme for new students focussing on study skills and other aspects of learning to put in place for the benefit of future intakes.
Like most universities, Maynooth University has a “Teaching & Learning Committee”. I sometimes wonder whether there is as strong a connection between these two words as we’d like to believe. At any rate, switching teaching online does not necessarily mean that learning goes with it!
So the exam period is upon us and I’ve spent all day dealing with lots of last-minute issues to do with that. Switching examinations online has led to Departments having to do themselves lots of things that were previously done by the Exams Office. Needless to say this transfer of workload has not been accompanied by a transfer of resources. Grumble, grumble.
Snow!
Anyway I’ll just mention that, aside from the blizzard of emails and administrative tasks, today saw the first snow in Maynooth for 2022. I took the picture this morning after a light dusting. Then it snowed again, more heavily, only for that to turn to turn to rain that washed all the snow away.
Incidentally, this picture on the same day last year…
After a mild holiday season it’s been much colder recently, with a consequent increase in food consumption by the garden birds. I’ll have to replenish my supplies over the weekend. I do feel a bit sorry for the little critters in this weather, even the neighbourhood rook which is constantly trying to demolish my feeders.
Today the Irish Government has announced that Third Level institutions in Ireland will reopen on Monday without any changes in Covid-19 restrictions. We don’t actually start teaching until January 31st, for which I am grateful. I don’t even students or staff crowding into lecture theatres on Monday. Assuming, that is, that there aren’t huge numbers of absences…
Fame at last! A colleague from the Department of Theoretical Physics at Maynooth University told me the above piece appeared in today’s Irish Times so I rushed out and bought the paper. My rapture was rapidly modified however when I discovered that my name was given incorrectly (as Cole instead of Coles), but that was to some extent offset by the amusement it would give my colleagues to see me described as an “Experiment Physicist”. These two slips are now corrected in the online version of the article which you can find here.
I was quite surprised by the sudden appearance of the article today because I spoke to the writer, Seán Duke, about Euclid well over a year ago (May 2020). That’s the reason that some things are a bit out of date. For example, the launch of Euclid will now not take place until the first quarter of 2023. Also the piece states that the largest telescope in space is the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) which is no longer the case (as of Christmas Day 2021…).
I’ll leave it as an exercise for the student to spot any other errors. Please feel free to point them out through the Comments Box. If you’re not banned, that is…
After two weeks of festive cooking for myself – something I was quite happy to do- this evening I thought I would mark Twelfth Night by getting a takeaway from my favourite local Thai restaurant. Sadly, however, this turned out to be impossible because they’re closed. The reason? Staff shortages caused by staff having to self-isolate due to Covid-19.
It’s not a big deal to have to make alternative arrangements for dinner, of course, but it got me thinking about all the other areas of life that are currently having the same problems. Many train services in and out of Dublin have been cancelled because of the lack of available train crew, for example. Ireland’s schools are supposed to reopen tomorrow after the Christmas break and it is likely that many teaching staff will be unavailable.
The timing of the academic term for staff Maynooth University is doing us some favours. On Friday 7th we start the examination period. Across the University, 95% of the assessments taking place are online. In my Department that is 100%, so neither students nor staff have to travel onto campus. Teaching does not start again until 31st January so we have over three weeks to see how the situation develops. Some other third-level institutions in Ireland had exams before Christmas so go straight back to teaching right now and I wonder how staff in those feelings are feeling about the prospect.
My biggest source of stress as Head of the Department of Theoretical Physics this academic year has been the fact that we have been short-staffed since the start of the year, half our teaching staff being temporary lecturers, and student numbers are well up on last year. If just one member of teaching staff were to become ill we would have serious difficulty covering the shortfall. Asymptomatic staff just having to self-isolate could teach online, of course, but someone who is ill can’t be expected to do that.
A specific worry I have for next Semester is the Computational Physics module I will be teaching. Last year we did this entirely online, which went satisfactorily; the subject lends itself fairly well to online teaching. This year however we are expected to be back in the lab. We have more than twice as many students in that class than we had last year so we’ll have to work out how to fit them safely into the relatively small teaching space we have available. We’ll certainly have to do two sessions per week but I may offer students the option of following along at home via Teams if they wish. I’ll decide that after the exams are over.
It is of course possible that the situation deteriorates very badly and we have to go fully online again. Possible, that is, but I think not likely. The Government seems determined not to countenance a return to remote working and probably won’t unless things get very much worse. As things stand, the omicron variant is running through the population like wildfire in terms of infections, but this has not led to ICU admissions or deaths on the same scale as last year.
All these issues are as nothing compared to the stress that must be felt right now by workers in the Health Services. After two years of exhausting work many health care workers are having to cover for staff absences in addition to dealing with an average of 20,000 new Covid-19 cases per day.
So I find myself almost at the end of the Christmas break as I did on the same day last year. Today being a Bank Holiday because New Year’s Day was on Saturday, tomorrow is officially my first day back at work. I don’t think I’ll be going back to my office on campus in the morning, though, as I think I can probably manage all the things I have to do from home. I haven’t looked in my mailbox since before Christmas so I imagine I’ll spend most of the day mucking that out.
Thanks to the state of the Covid-19 pandemic I will be working from home most of the time at least until Semester 2 teaching starts. Here is the situation, with cases clearly out of control, but no sign yet of an increase in mortality. We’ll see what happens when the weekly death figures are released on Wednesday.
No doubt as we get back to work there will be detailed instructions on what we can and can’t do. Semester Two of teaching in Maynooth doesn’t start for another 4 weeks so we have a bit of time to see how things progress before deciding what will happen. I expect various edicts will be issued from on high in the next few days.
I have been virtually incommunicado so am not sure how everyone else in the Department has been. I do hope nobody has fallen ill.
The January examination period starts on Friday (7th January) and ends two weeks later (Saturday 22nd January) so getting through that and getting the examinations marked is going to be the first priority. Yet again all these examinations will be in the form of online assessments. We have done this sort of examination before, which makes it a bit easier than last year, but they still cause a lot of stress for staff and students alike. I will have over a hundred scripts to mark and will have to do all of them on screen. I’m not looking forward to that at all, but it has to be done. My first exam is on Saturday afternoon (8th January) but there’s a gap of 10 days until the second one so hopefully I can get the first marked before the second is due.
I was tempted at this point to make a list of all the things I have to do tomorrow, but that would be breaking my resolution to take a complete break so I will leave that until the morning. I have done a few bits and pieces for the Open Journal of Astrophysics, though, as we embark on Vol. 5 (2022).
Yesterday was the last day of teaching at Maynooth University for 2021 and, although I didn’t have any teaching to do, I walked to the Department partly to get a bit of fresh air having been stuck at home on Thursday after my booster jab, and partly to collect a few things before the break. I also discovered that a lovely parcel of goodies had been sent to me and I was anxious to collect the items before Christmas.
I’ll be keeping myself to myself over the break, apart from the odd trip to the shops, and am glad to be doing so. We are yet to see the steep increase in Covid-19 cases associated with the omicron variant happening in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. If anything case numbers are currently declining slowly. But the new wave will undoubtedly hit Ireland soon.
UPDATE: not half an hour after I posted this, the HSE announced 7333 new cases of Covid-19 in Ireland, more than double yesterday’s figure and the highest number seen since early January. And this is before the Christmas surge.
The jury is still out on whether omicron is more or less dangerous than previous variants but it is clearly more transmissible, and I don’t see the point of taking chances, so I agree with the Irish Government on the need to take precautions. I don’t think the latest restrictions go anywhere near far enough though.
Yesterday we received at work an email from University management that said, among other things, that
At present the aim is to resume teaching on 31 January, as in Semester 1.
The phrase “as in Semester 1” means that large lectures will be online-only but everything else will be face-to-face. That is a reasonable starting point because the extent of the omicron wave is as yet unknown, but I think it’s more likely than not that in the end we’ll find ourselves doing everything online. I just hope a decision on that is made in reasonable time for us to put Plan B into action. We don’t start lectures again until January 31st and there should be enough data by then to make an informed decision.
I don’t want to sound unduly pessimistic but I don’t see any sign that we are anywhere near the end of this pandemic. With a bit of luck we might find that we’re roughly halfway through, but as long as governments allow large pools of virus to circulate, mutations will continue to occur and new variants will continue to emerge. To end this cycle will require a majority of the world’s population to be vaccinated, and I don’t see that happening soon.
I’ve been indisposed for most of today thanks to the after-effects of my booster jab, so I’ve just got time to pass on a bit of news about a job opportunity at Maynooth. You may recall that I announced recently that we are to receive a new Chair in Observational Astrophysics & Cosmology under the Strategic Academic Leadership Initiative. That post was made available in the second round of these positions and we hope to advertise it early in the New Year.
However, not all the first round positions have been filled yet so I thought I’d draw your attention to such a position in the area of Climate Change. My understanding is that this is going to be interpreted broadly including such areas as climate science, hydroclimatology, biogeography, paleoecology, paleoclimatology, oceanography, adaptation and mitigation, and remote sensing.
Given the overlap with geophysics and atmospheric physics, it may be that someone reading this blog might be tempted to apply. If so then you can find further details here. The deadline is Sunday January 30th 2022.
We’re approaching the end of term here at Maynooth University; the forthcoming week is the last week of teaching, after which we have the luxury of a full week without lectures or tutorials before Christmas itself. Apart from eating and drinking I think I’ll spend most of the holiday sleeping. The first official duty I will have in the new year is on Saturday 8th January when one of my online examinations is due to take place. After that it will be all marking papers and after that it will be preparing teaching for Semester 2…
At this start of this academic year I was quite confident that Semester 2 would find us more-or-less back to normal but that now seems very unlikely. I think that we’re going to be starting Semester 2 at the end of January 2022 exactly the same way that we started Semester 2 in January 2021, i.e. with everything fully online.
As of today, the recent rapid growth in Covid-19 infections seems to have slowed (and cases have been decreasing for a few days) but a Christmas surge seems inevitable and with many people having low protection against the omicron variant and very high case numbers even before the festive period, the period from January to March may be very difficult indeed. I stand to be proved wrong, though, and the trajectory of the pandemic is highly uncertain. We’ll just have to wait and see how things turn out. Fingers crossed.
I have explained before on this blog that I am going to be working from home next week, delivering my last lectures from my study and via recordings. I have better facilities for doing online lectures at home, because the University has failed to invest in decent recording equipment in its lecture theatres.
In any case I only have one full lecture to give in my first-year module (due tomorrow); the other two will be revision classes. I have finished the lectures for my second-year module so was just planning to do a revision class in the Tuesday slot. I did have some other (virtual) meetings in my calendar for next week but most of these have all been cancelled for one reason or another.
The one remaining task is to get all the online exams ready to go in January. We haven’t got the special Moodle spaces set up yet, but I imagine that will happen sometime next week.
By the way, when I responded to the close contact alert I received on Friday I was told I’d be sent an antigen test kit from the HSE. I haven’t got it yet but I suppose it may arrive next week. I still don’t have any symptoms though, and am effectively self-isolating anyway, so I’m not concerned. I just hope I get my booster on Wednesday without having to queue for too long…
I’m going to have an early night tonight as tomorrow promises to be a very “interesting” day. A large Atlantic weather system – Storm Barra – is heading towards Ireland and is expected to reach the South West coast around 3am tomorrow morning. It is expected to last about two hours.
As if the winds in excess of 130 km/h were not bad enough, the storm will reach the coast just before a very high tide so flooding is expected, especially near Cork.
Colleges and schools in the Red and Orange alert areas will be closed tomorrow. Maynooth is in a Yellow alert area so the current plan is for the University to remain open, but it may change to Orange overnight and I suspect a significant number of staff and students will not be able to make it in anyway.
I’ll leave it there for tonight and update tomorrow.
UPDATE: 9.20am. It was very windy from about 6am and is now raining very heavily. Some branches have come down but no serious damage done near where I am.
Update: 14:20pm. Winds steadily backing as the depression moves out across the Irish Sea, now North-Easterly bringing colder air.
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In the Dark 